Market Position and Competitive Analysis Dashboard

Business question: How is ASOS positioned on price and assortment versus H&M in the online fashion market, and where does this create pricing or assortment risk for ASOS based on their current online product catalogues?
Total products online
ASOS: 18,378 – H&M: 9,677
ASOS offers almost twice as many items as H&M.
Where prices are concentrated
ASOS mid‑range, H&M value‑heavy
ASOS: 63.8% of items priced £25–£75; H&M: 44.7% of items priced under £25.
High‑price ASOS categories
4 categories are almost all premium
ASOS EDITION satin, ASOS EDITION Curve, Never Fully Dressed, Polo Ralph Lauren.
Position inside each price band
ASOS sits closer to the top
Within the same price bands, ASOS prices nearer the top of the band than H&M, showing a more premium stance.

Visuals: price structure, assortment breadth and premium‑risk categories

Context

ASOS finds itself in a highly competitive online fashion sector where customers can effortlessly compare prices and products of competing brands such as H&M in no time, frequently from their mobile phones. The research posed a challenging question: is ASOS' combination of prices and categories gaining its competitive advantage or rather silently leading it to be viewed as too pricey in the most important areas of the range? The study by using volume of products in each price range, the real breadth of assortment compared to H&M, and categories that are almost pure exclusive of high-priced products, the analysis not only helps ASOS and its stakeholders to identify the positions that current decisions may be taking in terms of margin risk, value perception, or lack of growth opportunities.

Insights

Recommendations

Methods

Sources

Technical documentation

Data sources and collection methodology

Public ASOS and H&M product catalogues were downloaded from Kaggle, filtered to online fashion products and cleaned to standardise brand names, prices, currencies and category labels before being merged into a single analysis dataset derived only from these sources.

Tools and technologies used

Python with pandas and numpy was used for data preparation and analysis, Plotly was used to build interactive charts, and the workflow was developed and run in Google Colab or Jupyter Notebook. The final dashboard is delivered as a single HTML file with embedded Plotly.js so it can be viewed fully offline.

Reflection on using AI (ChatGPT)

AI (ChatGPT) was used as a support tool to refine the business question, suggest visual designs, review code structure and improve the clarity of commentary and headings. All datasets, calculations and numeric results come directly from running the Python notebook on the ASOS and H&M catalogue data, not from AI‑generated or synthetic data.

GDPR

This dashboard uses only aggregated, non personal product data scraped from publicly available ASOS and H&M catalogues. No customer, employee or other personal data is collected, stored or processed, and the analysis has been designed to comply with GDPR principles of data minimisation and privacy by design.

Limitations and risks

Steps to implementation

About

ASOS is a UK‑based online fashion and beauty retailer focused on twenty‑something customers, offering a wide range of own‑brand clothing and third‑party labels across multiple markets through its ecommerce platform.

The company competes with other fast‑ fashion and online players such as H&M, Zara and Boohoo, relying on its digital experience, assortment breadth and brand positioning rather than physical stores.

This dashboard was created as part of the MSc Business Analytics Business Intelligence project to demonstrate how publicly available Kaggle catalogue data for ASOS and H&M can be used to analyse competitive price and assortment positioning.

The work is non‑commercial and intended solely for academic assessment and demonstration of analytical and visualisation skills.